Toshiba Satellite A210 User Review

Once or twice per year, a friend or family member asks me to help them pick a notebook. Most of the folks I know just need a basic computer, and the reason they enlist me is that I love finding good deals on notebooks. This week I needed to find a good little Grandma computer. Having scanned the used sections of my favorite websites for deals I quickly determined that most people were stuck in 2005, asking way too much for notebooks that are much slower than current budget units.

So I hit the stores and found a pretty...

good assortment of dual core models in the $500-600 range from Acer, Dell, Compaq and Toshiba. The Toshiba Satellite A210-04F (A215 in the US) caught my eye:

* AMD Turion 64 X2 Mobile TL-60 (2.0GHz, 1MB Level 2 Cache)
* Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium
* 1GB RAM - 2x512MB DDR2 (667 MHz)
* 200GB SATA HDD, 4200rpm
* Built-in DVD Super-Multi Double Layer Drive functions:
* 15.4" Wide XGA TFT with TruBrite
* ATI Radeon X1200 GPU
* One Year International Warranty

According to Toshiba Canada's website the MSRP is $949.00 but street price is much lower ($499-$549 on sale). US pricing is a little more expensive, but the A215 comes with a slightly larger and faster hard drive (250GB, 5400rpm) and 2GB of system memory.